Remember when I spent half of the last review prefacing all of my thoughts with a disclaimer about how difficult it can be to divorce my experience with The Promised Neverland from its manga source material? Well, go ahead and multiply all of those sentiments by a hundred this week, because I m
really having a hard time framing the events of “Episode 4” from the perspective of an anime-only viewer. For whatever its worth, I still don t know how pleased I would have been with where the story goes this week.
To explain why that is, we can brush aside all of the spoilery thoughts I ll expound upon in the Odds and Ends below and ask one simple question: What does this episode accomplish, narratively? In the beginning, it seems like the answer would be “quite a lot!”, since that ringing payphone that Emma and Ray found contains a recording from none other than William Minerva himself, aka James Ratri, a human who was once associated with the running of the farms before he eve